Survey Results: What Swift Developers Use in Production

Survey: Which Swift (iOS/macOS) Frameworks Are Used in Production

The Swift developer community continues to grow actively, and along with it, the framework ecosystem. We conducted a survey among professional Swift developers to find out which tools are actually used in real commercial projects for iOS and macOS. More than 500 engineers from Russia and the CIS took part in the survey. We share the key results.

Leaders: SwiftUI and UIKit — Battle of Generations

Two frameworks for building user interfaces remain the undisputed favorites:

• SwiftUI — 68% of respondents use it in production. Main reasons: declarative syntax, less code, and excellent integration with Xcode Previews. However, the framework still requires iOS 15+ for full functionality, which limits its use in projects with broad support for older devices.
• UIKit — 54% of developers continue to use it, often in a hybrid combination with SwiftUI. UIKit remains indispensable for complex custom animations, working with collections, and supporting iOS 12–14.

Interestingly, 22% of respondents stated that they use both frameworks simultaneously, combining them via UIHostingController.

Networking and Architecture

In networking and data architecture, the situation is as follows:

• URLSession (built-in) — 71%. Despite the emergence of third-party libraries, the Apple solution remains the de facto standard.
• Alamofire — 33%. Still popular for complex scenarios with caching, retries, and logging.
• Combine — 29%. Used for reactive programming, most often in combination with SwiftUI and MVVM.
• Async/await (native) — 45%. Rapidly gaining traction, especially in new projects.

Server-Side Swift: Vapor — Undisputed Leader

For server-side development in Swift (macOS/Linux), the results are clear:

• Vapor — 78% among those who write backend in Swift. The framework offers a full stack: routing, ORM (Fluent), authentication, and WebSocket.
• Hummingbird — 9%. Lightweight and fast, but still niche.
• Kitura (IBM) — 3%. Has practically left the market, support discontinued.

Data Storage and Caching

In local storage, the leaders are:

• Core Data — 41% (more often in older projects).
• SwiftData — 27% (actively growing, especially in iOS 17+).
• Realm — 15% (losing ground due to MongoDB stepping back from active support).
• UserDefaults / Keychain — 89% (used by almost everyone for simple settings).

What Else Is Worth Noting

The survey also showed that 62% of developers use Swift Package Manager as their main dependency management tool. CocoaPods and Carthage are becoming a thing of the past — their share has dropped to 18% and 5%, respectively.

In addition